new york city

I was introduced to Jimi back when I was working at Max’s Kansas City in New York City. My friend John Kessler was running the sound and production and ask me to work with him at the club. I became a kind of a fixture working most of the time on the off nights and filling in on the weekends. John was doing some work with Jimi or Zhivag’s (thats what I called him) playing with his band and doing some sound recordings. He was always up beat and fun always fooling around. Below is a picture of some of the people in his band -Jimi next to Lisa (the blond girl) and John in the far upper right hand of the photo, Vinnie the drummer right below Lisa. For the life of me I can’t remember the other people’s names.

I remember at that time he was mainly playing a Gibson Thunderbird guitar and would switch over to acoustic guitar. I got the picture below from the Facebook post Lisa posted. That’s the Gibson Firebird! In those days we all needed money so we did odd jobs on the side between gigs or working at the clubs- we had a Job in East Williston for this office to build out some new walls to separate the office space. Jimi would come all the way out from the city by train -thank god the train let off in the East Williston train station in which the office that we were working at literally was behind the train station. He would come bopping in smoking a cigarette and would do pretty much do nothing throughout the day. At one point we had to spackle and sand the walls down and we were all wearing face masks, at the end of the day Jimi was covered in spackle dust from head to toe except for the ring around his mouth and nose, time to go-Jimi just jump on the first train back to the city dust and all, what a sight!

The last gig I remember doing with him and his band was at My Fathers Place in Roslyn. We put on a big production with great stage lighting and Fog Machines. Pretty much that was the last I saw of him as in life people move on. Happen to be googling on the web and typed in his name and found that he had passed back in 2018. I figured to put down a few memories about Jimi as he was a talented good dude and it was a time stamp in my life, Great Memories!

Enjoy Fire with Fire by Jimi Zhivago